Bollywood aggregation and production house Shemaroo Entertainment has appointed Subhash Somani to head the DTH business of the company. At Shemaroo, he will primarily be looking at content strategy, business development, and revenue. Also, he will lead and manage strategic partnerships with broadcasters and studios and will be playing a key role in new initiatives and launches. Somani joined the company from Videocond2h as a senior manager for content. At Videocon d2h, he was primarily involved in content acquisition and launch of new value-added services (VAS) for the d2h platform. Shemaroo is ramping up its DTH offerings and has partnered with all the DTH players including Tata Sky, Airtel Digital, Videocon d2h and Dish TV. Shemaroo offers VAS services on all the major DTH platforms covering multiple genres. These include devotional services like iDevotion, Miniplex (for movies), Sadabahar Hits (for music). Earlier this week, the company appointed Zubin Dubash as its COO for New Media business. Dubash will be looking at distribution of Shemaroo’s content to platforms and retailers, and possibly telecom operators. The new media revenues at the company has been steadily rising. Shemaroo posted new media revenue of Rs 23.5 crore for the quarter ended December 2016 (Q3FY17), up 41.6% Year-on-Year (YoY) from Rs 16.6 crore in the same quarter last year. However, Shemaroo’s new media revenue accounted for only 17% of the overall revenue. The company made more money (83%) via traditional offline media operations, which stood at Rs 89.2 crore during the quarter, up 5.7% YoY from Rs 84.4 crore.
